Han Peril: China’s Voracious Appetite for Timber Stokes Fury in Russia and Beyond

After sharply restricting logging in its own forests, China turned to imports, overwhelming even a country with abundant resources: Russia.
By Steven Lee Myers

Logs from Russia stacked outside Manzhouli, a Chinese border town, where the wood is processed and then shipped throughout the country and the world.

From the Altai Mountains to the Pacific Coast, logging is ravaging Russia’s vast forests, leaving behind swathes of scarred earth studded with dying stumps.
The culprit, to many Russians, is clear: China.
Since China began restricting commercial logging in its own natural forests two decades ago, it has increasingly turned to Russia, importing huge amounts of wood in 2017 to satisfy the voracious appetite of its construction companies and furniture manufacturers.
“In Siberia, people understand they need the forests to survive,” said Eugene Simonov, an environmentalist who has studied the impact of commercial logging in Russia’s Far East. 

“And they know their forests are now being stolen.”
Russia has been a witting collaborator, too, selling Chinese companies logging rights at low cost and, critics say, turning a blind eye to logging beyond what is legally allowed.
Chinese demand is also stripping forests elsewhere — from Peru to Papua New Guinea, Mozambique to Myanmar.

More than 120 companies and factories have opened in Manzhouli to capitalize on the wood trade, which has skyrocketed since China restricted timber in its natural-growth forests.

In the Solomon Islands, the current pace of logging by Chinese companies could exhaust the country’s once pristine rain forests by 2036, according to Global Witness, an environmental group. 

In Indonesia, activists warn that illegal logging linked to a company with Chinese partners threatens one of the last strongholds for orangutans on the island of Borneo.
Environmentalists say China has simply shifted the harm of unbridled logging from home to abroad, even as it reaps the economic benefits. 

Some warn that the scale of logging today could deplete what unspoiled forests remain, contributing to global warming.
At the same time, China is protecting its own woodlands.
Two decades ago, concerns about denuded mountains, polluted rivers and devastating floods along the Yangtze River made worse by damaged watersheds prompted the Communist government to begin restricting commercial logging in the nation’s forests.
The country’s demand for wood did not diminish, however. 

Nor did the world’s demand for plywood and furniture, the main wood products that China makes and exports.
It is one thing for Chinese demand to overwhelm small, poor nations desperate for cash, but it is another for it to drain the resources of a far larger country, one that regards itself as a superpower and a strategic partner to China.
The trade has instead underscored Russia’s overreliance on natural resources and provoked a popular backlash that strains the otherwise warm relations between the countries’ two leaders, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
Protests have erupted in many cities. 

Members in Russia’s upper house of parliament have assailed officials for ignoring the environmental damage in Siberia and the Far East. 

Residents and environmentalists complain that logging is spoiling Russian watersheds and destroying the habitats of the endangered Siberian tiger and Amur leopard.
“What we are doing now in Siberia and the Far East is destroying what is left of the original intact forest landscapes,” said Nikolay M. Shmatkov, director of the forestry program for the World Wildlife Fund in Russia. 

The group has documented the destruction using satellite images over a period that coincides with the Chinese logging boom in the country.
“It’s not sustainable,” he said.

Matryoshka Square in Manzhouli, named after the Russian nesting dolls. The square contains hundreds of oversized dolls, called taowa in Chinese, including a 17-story hotel, center, that claims to be the world’s largest.

‘Nothing Will Be Left’
China’s economic transformation over the last four decades has driven its demand. 

It is now the world’s largest importer of wood. (The United States is second.) 

It is also the largest exporter — turning much of the wood it imports into products headed to Home Depots and Ikeas around the world.
The total value of China’s timber imports — rough logs, timber or wood pulp — has increased more than 10 times since China began restricting logging at home in 1998, reaching $23 billion in 2017, the highest ever, according to IHS Markit’s Global Trade Atlas.
The government extended a regional ban to the rest of the country at the end of 2016. 

It now allows commercial logging only in forests that have been replanted, a policy that environmentalists say other countries should emulate.
The problem is that many have not, and Chinese companies have pursued these opportunities.
More than 500 Chinese companies operate in Russia now, often with Russian partners, according to a report by Vita Spivak, a scholar on China for the Carnegie Moscow Center. 

Russia once delivered almost no wood to China; it now accounts for more than 20 percent of China’s imports by value.
“If the Chinese come, nothing will be left,” Marina Volobuyeva, a resident of the Zamensky region south of Lake Baikal, told a television channel after a Chinese company secured a 49-year lease to log in the area.
Russia sells such logging concessions at prices that vary by region and type of wood, but on average, they cost roughly $2 a hectare, or 80 cents an acre, per year, according to Mr. Shmatkov of the World Wildlife Fund. 

That is far below the cost in other countries.
In 2017, China imported nearly 200 million cubic meters of wood from Russia.
Artyom Lukin, a professor of international studies at the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, noted that government corruption, criminality and the lack of economic development in Siberia and the Far East have also made the crisis worse.
“In many rural areas of the Russian Far East and Siberia, there are few other ways to make money, or to make a living, than stripping natural resources of the vast surrounding forests,” he said.

The border crossing at Manzhouli, marked by two arches and divided on the Chinese side by a green wire fence that stretches for hundreds of miles. The Chinese side is a park that is closed to foreigners. The crossing has become China’s largest landlocked port for goods, including wood, coal and petrochemicals.

Transformed by Timber
For China, though, the trade has been a boon.
Much of the wood from Russia crosses the border in Manzhouli, a former nomadic settlement that became a junction in the Trans-Siberian Railway at the turn of the 20th century. 

The trade has transformed what was once a sleepy border town into one of China’s main hubs for wood processing and production.
In the last two decades, more than 120 mills and factories have sprung up. 

They process raw or rough-cut lumber into plywood, and manufacture veneer panels, laminated wood, doors, window frames and furniture.
The factories cover dozens of acres on the city’s edge and have created more than 10,000 jobs in a city of 300,000 people, according to a municipal official.
New construction has made the city an architectural homage to Russian culture. 

Many buildings have features like onion domes. 

There is even a replica of St. Basil’s Cathedral that is a children’s science museum, and a hotel in the shape of what officials claim is the world’s largest matryoshka, or nesting doll.
Zhu Xiuhua’s career has traced the arc of the Russian trade.
Now 50, Ms. Zhu moved to Manzhouli when China began restricting logging. 

She began brokering imports from Russia, then in 2002 began to seek the rights to log Russian forests directly. 

Four years later, she founded the company she owns today, the Inner Mongolia Kaisheng Group, one of the city’s biggest.
Ms. Zhu now oversees three factories in Manzhouli, as well as concessions to log 1.8 million acres of Russian forests near Bratsk, a city next to Lake Baikal, and to transport them to China. 

“We are growing every year,” she said.
When pressed, she declined to discuss her concessions in detail, but according to the company’s website, she had invested $20 million in Russia by 2015. 

China’s official Xinhua News Agency estimated the conglomerate’s assets at $150 million in 2017.
In Ms. Zhu’s view, the trade is a classic case of supply meeting demand. 

She described it, perhaps overconfidently, as enduring.
The next step will be to seek more concessions westward. 

“Krasnoyarsk,” she said, using first the Mandarin version of the name before pronouncing it in Russian. 

“You could not log all of it in 100 years,” she said.

Zhu Xiuhua built a conglomerate of companies based in Manzhouli that log, transport and process wood from Russia.

Laundering Logs
There are international protocols that seek to control where and what kinds of trees are logged, and the United States extended the Lacey Act in 2008 to ban the import of wood obtained illegally anywhere, but such regulations are difficult to enforce.
In some countries, like the United States and Canada, logging is strictly policed, but Chinese companies often exploit lax oversight elsewhere and log in protected forests, according to officials and environmentalists.
In Russia, logging commonly encroaches on areas outside the allotted boundaries and companies that export wood to China are known to falsify records.
Logging without contracts is also common, while arsonists are suspected of having set fires to forests, because scorched trees can be legally culled and sold.
In 2016, the United States Justice Department accused Lumber Liquidators of illegally importing hardwood flooring that was mostly made in China using timber illegally harvested in Russia’s Far East.
Accusations of corruption have stirred public anger in Russia. 

A question on the extent of illegal logging prompted an acerbic response from Putin in his annual news conference in December. 

He called Russia’s forestry industry “a very corrupt sector.”

The booming trade with Russia has transformed Manzhouli, which was once a sleepy border town. Much of the architecture has Russian features, while many shops and restaurants advertise in both languages, catering to tourists and traders.

‘Barbaric Deforestation’
Protests against logging — and Chinese logging in particular — have erupted across Siberia and the Russian Far East. 

They have stoked ethnic tensions along a border that extends over 2,600 miles between Russians and Chinese who had long had mutual suspicions shaped by political and cultural differences.
One protest last May in Ulan Ude, a regional capital near Lake Baikal, resulted in scuffles with the police and eight arrests. 

“Stop the barbaric deforestation,” a sign declared.
The issue has become so politically volatile that in January the head of Russia’s forestry service, Ivan Valentik, faced pointed questioning in the upper house of parliament, which does not usually challenge Putin’s government directly.
He defended the concessions, but also sought to shift blame to the Chinese companies for not fulfilling their contracts — by, for example, replanting forests. 

He suggested that Russia could be forced to end direct sales of timber to China.
In China, the State Forestry and Grassland Administration did not respond to written questions. Officials have previously pledged that Chinese companies would adhere to local laws and be mindful of the environmental impact.
Ms. Zhu initially said she did not worry about the protests inside Russia since everything her company did was done according to Russian laws. 

After the latest round of public hearings in Moscow, however, she sounded less sanguine.
“Russia is changing now,” she said by telephone, and then declined to answer any more questions.

Tibet's fragile ecosystem is in danger. China must change its flawed environmental policy

Rising temperatures on the roof of the world make Tibet both a driver and amplifier of global warming. China’s unchecked mining and dam building has to be reigned in.
By Lobsang Sangay

‘In the age of climate change the future of Asia and by extension that of our planet Earth hinges on the developments in Tibet, the roof of the world.’

As Australia continues to battle a water crisis and the challenges facing the world’s driest inhabited continent, Tibet on the other hand is Asia’s water tower, its principal rainmaker and the largest source of fresh water, feeding over a billion lives in Asia including China.
At an average elevation of 4,000 meters above sea level and with an area of 2.5m sq km, Tibet is the world’s highest and largest plateau. 

It’s nearly two-third the size of the European continent. 

If Tibet were still a sovereign nation it would be the world’s tenth largest. 

It has the largest concentration of the world’s tallest mountains and is called the earth’s third pole because it has the largest reservoir of glacial ice after the two poles. 

Tibet is also a treasure trove of minerals, oil and natural gas reserves and a leading producer of lithium in China.
The Chinese scientists have over the years been proposing an increase in nature reserves across Tibet considering the fragile ecosystem on the plateau. 

In April this year China unveiled its grand plans on turning the entire stretch of Tibet into a national park.
The Chinese government has been declaring more and more national parks and nature reserves across Tibet in recent years, and this is a welcome gesture. 

The Chinese government must take into consideration the fragility and delicate nature of Tibet’s environment and reign in the factors that contribute to environmental crises in Tibet: rapid urbanisation, transfer of Chinese population into Tibet, unchecked mining on Tibet’s sacred mountains, and damming of Tibet’s rivers to facilitate hydro power projects.
In light of such robust projects, Tibetans are not only deprived of their traditional way of living, but are made peripheral beneficiaries of the projects.
The real beneficiaries are the Chinese officials who pocket their share of the gain, the Chinese companies and the Chinese employers benefitting from the economic opportunities.
We are not against Chinese developmental projects in Tibet per se, but we propose that the real beneficiaries of any development must be Tibetans in Tibet. 

Any projects that China undertake must be environmentally sustainable, culturally sensitive and economically beneficially to local Tibetans.
China’s rolling of its strategic and economic imperatives in Tibet has greater implications on the larger environmental consequences caused by climate change.
Today, the Chinese government’s flawed environmental and developmental policies have turned this resource-rich plateau and fragile ecosystem into a hub of its mining and dam building activities. 

This not only changes the water map of Asia for the worse but also contributes to an environmental crisis, which in turn contributes to climate change across Asia. 

The rising temperatures on the roof of the world make Tibet both a driver and amplifier of global warming.
2016 has been a year of natural disasters: a glacial avalanche in Aru in the Ngari region (Western Tibet), and mud floods and a landslide in Amdo (eastern Tibet). 

Between June and July 2017 alone, four distinct cases of floods were reported in Kham (south east region of Tibet). 

These are the cumulative effect of climate change.
More cases of natural disasters are imminent. 

The Chinese government must consider these impending threats and accordingly orient its urban development project towards mitigating the increasing threats posed by climate change.
China has escalated military control over Tibetan borders, expanded mining based on the rich resources of the Tibetan plateau in order to fuel China’s economic development and has dramatically expanded infrastructure with a strategic road and rail network. 

It seeks to raise the productivity of the industrial cities of Xi’an, Chongqing and Chengdu at the foot of the Tibetan plateau and to address the progressive scarcity of water resources in the North and North-East of China with water sourced in Tibet.
Tibet is facing two critical issues: Its political and environmental future. 

Of the two, the latter is a bigger issue given the implications for Asia and the rest of the world.

Dalai Lama says strong action on climate change is a human responsibility.

Tibet symbolises the three crises that confront Asia today; a natural resources crisis, an environmental and a climate crisis. 

These three are interlinked and potentially pose a threat to the ecological wellbeing and climate security not just of Asia but even of Europe, North America and Australia. 

According to leading scientists, the recent heat waves in Europe are linked to loss of ice on the Tibetan plateau. 

A team led by Hai Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Environment Canada in Quebec found that the greater snow-cover in Tibet, the warmer the winter in Canada.
Such formidable scenarios demand greater global attention and a forward-looking leadership to assuage the larger affects of an environmental crisis befalling Tibet. 

The world leaders must act prudently and not allow political constrains to dwarf redressal mechanism at institutional level to an impending global environmental crisis.
Veerabhadran Ramanathan from the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego has rightly said that “our understanding of global climate change would be incomplete without taking into consideration what’s happening to the Tibetan plateau.”
Tibet’s environment impinges on regional and global security. 

The global efforts to reign in China’s policies in Tibet underpinning an oversight of the importance of Tibet’s environment and sensitivity over its fragile ecosystem, must be robust. 

In the age of climate change the future of Asia and by extension that of our planet Earth hinges on the developments in Tibet, the roof of the world.

China's Electric Cars Are Actually Pretty Dirty

The technology is only as clean as its sources of power.
By Mark Buchanan

Where you get the power matters. 

Could China, the world's largest automobile market, help address the threat of global warming if it went completely electric? 

The answer isn’t as obvious as it seems.
China has been making great strides toward electrification. 

Electric vehicle sales are booming: Consumers bought more than 300,000 last year, and more than 5 million are expected to be on the road by 2020. 

The government just announced bold plans for a wave of big new battery factories.
Encouraging as that may be, though, the move away from conventional cars and trucks won’t immediately reduce the country’s carbon emissions. 

On the contrary, the production and exploitation of electric vehicles in China actually produces more greenhouse gases and consumes more overall energy. 

In the short run, China’s moves could make greenhouse emissions go up, not down.
Electric vehicles seem environmentally benign. 

They’re lightweight, energy-efficient, and potentially greener than their conventional counterparts. But the reality is more complex. 

Their manufacture entails energy-intensive mining of rare elements, such as the lithium required for their batteries. 

Their fuel efficiency can make up for that in the course of use, but only if the electricity is produced in a relatively clean way.
Developed nations get the best results, because they tend to generate electricity using cleaner sources. By one estimate, the average electric car in the U.S. has just half the greenhouse gas impact of a conventional car over its life cycle. 

It’s even less in the western, southern and northeastern parts of the country, where power plants draw more renewable power. 

A comprehensive energy model being developed by Argonne National Laboratory produces a similar estimate.
Europe does well, too. 

Looking at all the processes involved in the manufacture, use, and ultimate disposal of a range of both electrical and conventional vehicles, Norwegian researchers found that electric vehicles offer at least a 10 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (assuming they were driven about 150,000 kilometers). 

To be sure, electric-vehicle batteries impose a host of other environmental costs linked to the mining of rare metals. 

But on carbon emissions, electric vehicles win out.
The real challenge to reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be in developing nations -- especially China, which is likely to dominate the global auto market for decades to come. 

Unfortunately, the structure of China’s industrial economy will make it difficult. 

One recent study by Chinese engineers estimated that electric vehicles generate about a 50 percent increase in both greenhouse gas emissions and total energy consumption over their life cycle. 

The manufacture of the lithium-ion battery alone accounts for 13 percent of the energy consumption and 20 percent of the emissions.
The most promising ways to make electric vehicles better have little to do with the vehicles themselves. 

Energy infrastructure matters more. 

In China, electricity production still relies quite heavily on high-carbon sources including coal. 

Hence, both the manufacturing of the batteries and the operation of the vehicle produce more pollution than they would elsewhere. 

The recycling industry in China is also underdeveloped. 

U.S. steel is about 70 percent recycled, compared with just 11 percent in China.
Electric vehicles can help China reduce greenhouse emissions only in the context of a deeper shift toward renewable sources of energy and greater efficiency. 

No one technology alone can create a green revolution.